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  <title>Simple Helpsystem</title>
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<h1>Simple Help System</h1>
SimpleHelpSystem is a simple api I use to add html -&nbsp; help to some
applications. This is a very simple thing that parses a directory, zip
or jar-file for some html -&nbsp; files and transforms the directory
structure into a tree structure.&nbsp; Looks like this:<br>
<br>
<img height="311" width="832" alt="Screenshot" title="Screenshot"
 src="screenshot.png"><br>
<br>
The html-page <tt>&lt;title&gt;</tt> element is parsed and shown as a
tree entry. If no title tag is present, the filename is shown. An
index.html or index.htm file (if any) is used as entry for the
directory entry. The other files are shown in alphabetical order.<br>
<br>
The api's main entry point is the&nbsp; <br>
<br>
<tt>&nbsp; de.herberlin.help system.SimpleHelpsystem</tt><br>
<br>
This class extends javax.swing.JFrame so it should be easy to set up
the SimpleHelpsystem with other applications. With the conctructor you
give the location of your helpfiles. For example:<br>
<br>
<tt>JPanel panel=new SimpleHelpSystem("myhelp");</tt><br>
<br>
The help system searches for a subdirectory to current directory
(System.property "user.dir"), if any parses it as help - root. If no
directory exists, help system looks for a <tt>myhelp.zip</tt> and then
for a <tt>myhelp.jar</tt> file to parse these archives for html -
helpfiles. <br>
<br>
For parsing the title tags may take a while it is recommendet to create
help system after your application starts and hide it. You should not
close the surrounding frame but just hide it to keep help system in
memory.<br>
<br>
To display a certain helppage, for example a page
myhelp/support/contact.html call:<br>
<br>
<tt>SimpleHelpSystem#display("/support/contact");</tt><br>
<br>
The key is the path to the corresponding file in the help system
location without <tt>.html</tt> or <tt>.htm</tt>.<br>
<h3>Limitations:</h3>
Help system does not work with JavaWebstart. I tried to make it work
but did not succeed. I think the concept of parsing an existing
directory of file at runtime is wrong for JavaWebstart.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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